Redefining Safety for Autonomous Vehicles
This work addresses safety terminology gaps for autonomous vehicles, which is incremental as it builds on existing standards.
The authors tackled the problem of outdated safety definitions for autonomous vehicles by proposing updated core safety concepts to address new challenges like open-world operation and ethical constraints, aiming to inform safety terminology for other autonomous systems.
Existing definitions and associated conceptual frameworks for computer-based system safety should be revisited in light of real-world experiences from deploying autonomous vehicles. Current terminology used by industry safety standards emphasizes mitigation of risk from specifically identified hazards, and carries assumptions based on human-supervised vehicle operation. Operation without a human driver dramatically increases the scope of safety concerns, especially due to operation in an open world environment, a requirement to self-enforce operational limits, participation in an ad hoc sociotechnical system of systems, and a requirement to conform to both legal and ethical constraints. Existing standards and terminology only partially address these new challenges. We propose updated definitions for core system safety concepts that encompass these additional considerations as a starting point for evolving safe-ty approaches to address these additional safety challenges. These results might additionally inform framing safety terminology for other autonomous system applications.